Trolley problems appeal to people who like solving puzzles.
Ethics is not sudoku. That way of thinking reliably leads to extreme moral misjudgment.https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1235990195297816577 …
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Replying to @Meaningness
Thought experiments in ethics are to parse out principles in extreme situations. SSC called them the "linear accelerators" of ethics, and I kind of agree. Obvs most real world applications are made under circumstances of substantial uncertainty with conflicting values in play.
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Replying to @xstntlprvrt69 @Meaningness
Right, but ethical decision making in practice isn't about making perfect decisions given full information, it's about making reliably good ones under bounded rationality and information, and if you include weird shit in your training you fit to the wrong distribution.
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Replying to @DRMacIver @Meaningness
Again, you’re not supposed to be using the thought experiment to simulate real decision making so that you can make similar judgments later. You’re doing it to isolate the inner workings of our moral intuitions.
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But our moral intuitions don't function inside the trolley-problem vantage point of a decontextualized lone actor making a one-time decision with perfectly knowable effects.
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Indeed. This is like criticizing a particle accelerator for not resembling most collisions. It’s not supposed to model most collisions. It’s supposed to constrain factors to get a very close-up view of the specifics.
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True of particle accelerators, surely. But it's question-begging to assume our ethical reasoning inside the trolley problem is just a constrained microcosm of our ethical reasoning outside the problem.
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That’s a fair and interesting criticism. But different to my eyes that the other criticism.
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I agree that it would be misguided to criticize trolley problems by saying they're like assuming a spherical cow--it's awfully useful to assume a spherical cow sometimes.
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Replying to @nthropologetic @RealtimeAI and
Better critique takes a step further: you assume a spherical cow because in physics you can map back from ideal to real by adding in a bunch of known extraneous factors. Whereas it's not clear that it even makes sense to talk about "ideal" (disembodied, decontextualized) ethics.
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When I go for a road trip, I always bring a map. I don't know why; it never corresponds perfectly to the territory.
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Replying to @xstntlprvrt69 @RealtimeAI and
If trolley problems were a map of something, they would be very useful! But why should we think they are?
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Why should we think that our instincts tell us anything about our minds?
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End of conversation
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